By: Ariel Ryann, Kit Horn
Jedediah
Speaking with you has been like sharing crayons
or rolling down hills while lying down
but now it more newly numbs my tongue
cooing patience and virtues
with you so demure and
my own coy eagerness
to no longer be. We can both see
I am thick and sweet
like your syrup stacks of poetry
drizzled onto me
like maple tree
taps pumping,
sap dumping
miles high.
And you say you envy me,
“’Cause you can spend time with you
whenever you like,” and I imagine
fabric muffling
your chest’s thumping
in the night.
And it’s remarkable,
outstanding, fulfilling to know
that my existing on a mattress for oh so
long could make you—
oh, someone like you—no,
I mean to say—may I please
ask you if I can
make you
as happy
as you ought to be?
‘Cause a sheet of cloth could still keep us
as far apart as we are now. Oh,
as far apart as we are now,
I can only assume that your shirt must feel warm.
-Ariel Ryann
O Green World
I remember that winter
when we trekked across the desert,
down in old Nevada,
to escape the Arctic glare.
Instead, we got snow-coated cacti
under a radiation-tinted sun,
and long emptied towns,
gone up in the dried out flames
of dust and fallout, just to discover
they’d closed the Grand Canyon due to ice.
-Kit Hornby
Heaven’s Gate
I realize now as you
allow yourself to be set ablaze
for a greater purpose than what
we had been promised once upon
a long time gone that maybe it really
wasn’t worth it in the end for the fee we
were quoted when it was all just figures and
schematics for a falling star that brought with it
a trail of madness and long gone minds that once
belonged to royalty and scientists who gave it up as
they embraced a greater wisdom than our minds had been
prepared to hold in the primordial ooze of our criminal creation
-Kit Hornby
This article was originally published on our old website at https://thenewspaper.ca/the-inside/march-poetry-submissions/.
